March 20, 2017

Meet Paul McKeon of Team Building with Taste in Dunwoody

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul McKeon.

Paul, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Team Building with Taste is a result of two things: my love of food and cooking and past experience growing and managing high performance business teams. For more than 20 years, I managed writers, artists, programmers and other “creative” types. A special hand and nuance is necessary for that, and we have always stressed group team building activities. What we’ve done with Team Building with Taste is grafted some of the precepts of good team building onto a culinary platform. So we have deadline pressure, risk reward tradeoffs, collaboration, group creativity and decision making–all coming together in an hour to make a great dish as a team and beat the competition.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It’s been successful and fun, especially to see the pride on people’s faces as they create a great dish that just an hour before hand they did not think they could make. But it is never easy. This is the 5th company that I have started. We had a group of 50 here one night and a thunderstorm hit and killed all the power right in the middle of cooking. We quickly got out some Bunsen burners and finished the night as an appetizer challenge. The loved it. One night a group of 70 got off a bus from Microsoft. Only one person on our staff was at our team building kitchen. Microsoft had the wrong night!

Of course, staffing is always an issue in the food service or hospitality business, but we have a good team right now.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Team Building with Taste is corporate culinary team building. We help organizations build higher performing teams by bringing them to our Dallas or Atlanta team building kitchens and having them work together as teams to create a great meal. In the process, they develop more familiarity, respect and trust among the teammates, which hopefully translates back to the workplace in higher performance.

We are not only chef driven, but business driven, our curriculum was written by business professionals to map the 3 hour culinary experience to a typical day in the office.

Also our kitchens are stocked with trained chefs as well as real commercial cooking equipment; deep fryers, salamander broilers, convection ovens. People like cooking in a professional kitchen, not one with residential appliances.

People feel comfortable in kitchens. They are naturally nurturing places and it brings out the best in them.

What were you like growing up?
An athlete. Competitive. Hard working. Almost since the age of 13, I have always had a job.

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